


halves

by relationshipcrimes



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Gen, Look. The fic has Shido in it. Expect canon-typical Shido behavior, Mention of Statutory Rape, Predatory behavior from Shido, Shido-typical misogyny, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24899383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes
Summary: Shido is exactly the sort of person who assumes that he has the right to take out his petty feelings on everything else around him. Because the habit never got crushed out of him. Because nobody ever taught him to be smaller, to hide away, that this world is not his to participate in. Because nobody can stop him from doing it, now that he’s old and rich and in charge of people’s paychecks. Goro takes these moments for himself, files them away, keeps them sharp. He’d rather die than forget why he’s angry. He’s very glad that Shido makes such a career out of reminding Goro why he’s angry every minute of every day.
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Shido Masayoshi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 178





	halves

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the prince](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21932836) by [relationshipcrimes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes). 



The woman walks right into an oncoming subway train not four stops away from the newspaper’s offices, effectively taking whatever dirty secrets she’d been about to unleash upon the press about Masayoshi Shido with her. Goro confirms it on his way from the Metaverse to Shido’s office with Shido’s surveillance crew that Goro isn’t supposed to know about. (After all, most of the time that surveillance crew spends its time watching Goro himself.) Kondo’s death isn’t going to be end of this particular political scandal—not if she’s been endorsed by some other minister of some other department in the highest echelons of government—Inoue, this time, who’s been pushing his limits to see what he can get away with lately—but it does send a significant message to whomever is attempting to destroy Shido’s political career via public scandal this time around, and it’s a bit hard to accuse Shido of statutory rape when the girl herself is in several pieces under the subway train.

The surveillance crew took a video. Phone camera, of course, so the video is shaky and surreptitiously taken close to someone’s chest. It’s a little unbelievable to watch; it’s so gentle, the way she just steps off the platform, as easily as someone would step on the train; one second she’s there, the next her body is lurching across the screen in a ragdoll blur that Goro would have found unrealistic as a special effect in a movie, and then she’s gone altogether. In the elevator going up to Shido’s palace, Goro watches the woman die twice, in neat succession due to the video’s auto-play loop, as if watching two separate women having committed suicide because of Masayoshi Shido in identical ways. Then the elevator doors open, and Goro closes his phone, rather than be one of those teens who walks around staring at his phone screen.

Goro walks down the hallway like he belongs there, making no eye contact with anyone in the hallway, staring right past them. He walks right up to Shido’s door. Announces himself. For some reason, the thing he regrets the most is having let the video loop to watch it twice. Seems like a woman should only have to die once, and have the dignity of not having the image of her death repeated and thus have its impact watered down. She should have the dignity of having scarred the very image of her death onto the inside of Goro’s skull until the day he dies, a tombstone that won’t ever chip or fade or go unattended. Shido yells at him to come in.

The last thing he thinks before he pushes the door open is that he does not give a single damn about that woman, because he is _not_ going to throw up in his shit of a father’s office.

To call Shido’s office a “mess” would be a charitable and kind description. There’s a laptop facedown on the ground, bending the hinge back in unnatural angles. Papers, obviously; not that Goro thinks he reads any of those papers, but he always seems to have enough to shove dramatically off his table in a blind fury. The nice pens are scattered. For some reason there’s an empty whiskey glass on an armchair, like Shido had thrown it to break it, only for the glass to hit the leather backseat and roll harmlessly to the cushion. The piece of shit threw a temper tantrum, Goro notices sourly, with an additional side of extra sour, thinking back on how the _slightest_ indication of a raised voice or scattered toy used to get him entire lectures from foster parents about _tantrums_ and _having an attitude_.

Shido is exactly the sort of person who assumes that he has the right to take out _his_ petty feelings on everything else around him. Because the habit never got crushed out of him. Because nobody ever taught him to be smaller, to hide away, that this world is not his to participate in. Because nobody can stop him from doing it, now that he’s old and rich and in charge of people’s paychecks. Goro takes these moments for himself, files them away, keeps them sharp. He’d rather die than forget why he’s angry. He’s very glad that Shido makes such a career out of reminding Goro why he’s angry every minute of every day.

Shido himself turns around, from where he’d been hunched over his outrageously large window. “Well?” he snarls.

“It’s done, Shido-san,” says Goro.

“I _know_ it’s done. You think I didn’t get that call? I want _Inoue’s_ head, or didn’t you get a clue?”

A sort of odd sense of calm washes over Goro just then, in the same sort of way he used to when a foster sibling was too afraid of doing something—asking for breakfast, explaining their skinned knee, climbing the tallest tree—and all of a sudden Goro found himself incredibly brave, just out of sheer disgust for their spinelessness. Now Goro’s voice is almost saint-like in its patience, pleased as anything to watch his piece of shit father fall to pieces in his sanctimonious office: “Inoue has too many allies to go after directly. Taking care of Kondo is the only safe move at this time. We’ll address him as soon as it’s safe.”

“And how long until he tries to drag my name through the press again?!” Shido slams his open hand on the wooden desk. Goro doesn’t flinch, but he does stop breathing. There’s a ring on his finger that cracks against the wooden surface like metal on flesh. “He went so far as to dig up some fourteen-year-old girl’s nonsense from ten years ago, like she wasn’t whoring herself out to start with…”

“He’s no match for us, Shido-san,” Goro says again, almost soothing. “He’s not a threat. Nobody is a threat to you, now. It’s just a matter of ensuring the pieces are in the right places—”

“ _I know that_!”

Goro holds himself very still. “Fuck!” Shido says, with emphasis, and finally sits back in his chair to drag a hand across his sweaty forehead. “Do you understand my position at all, Akechi? Do you?”

Goro can feel the conversation sliding out of his grip, the weight tilting unevenly like an unbalanced weapon. Before Goro can say anything, Shido goes on: “You think I’m not aware that all it takes is _one witness_ to the wrong journalist and my career is over? How many pieces of corrupt politician _trash_ in this building _alone_ would love to see me dragged through the streets for stuff they’ve done themselves _and more_? “Every other year it’s another son of a bitch trying to blow the whistle on me,” Shido seethes, turning his head this way and that, like he wants to pace or lunge or _something_ but is just barely in control of himself to know he can’t without looking like a lunatic. “Like they aren’t all filth themselves—like they haven’t embezzled millions of millions of yen every year under the guise of this _damn_ bureaucracy—”

“Yes, of course. Absolutely,” says Goro, falling back on the usual lines of defense of excessive agreement, buttering up his ego, and appealing to his victim-complex. He realizes too late that he’s taken half a step back; makes himself step closer, in case Shido smelled weakness and decided to tear it—and Goro—apart just for something to do. “I understand completely, Shido-san. This entire government is full of filth.”

Shido hits the table again. The ring makes that _awful_ fucking noise again. “And they want to scapegoat _me_. Of all people! When I’m practically the only goddamn person in this building who has any sense, any vision at all for this sinking carcass of a country…” There’s a moment of silence, which Goro doesn’t appreciate because he’s too busy trying to figure out how to salvage this conversation, when Shido says: “Get out.”

“Shido-san, it’s in your best interests to discuss how we’re going to handle Inoue if it comes up aga—"

“If you’re not going to take care of him, get out!” Shido snaps. “You think we couldn’t have had this useless conversation in a phone call?”

Shido is the one who insists on avoiding detailed discussions over traceable lines. “I—”

“You think I want to talk to you if it’s not over Inoue’s body?”

“We didn’t—”

“Don’t talk back to me.”

“I only meant—”

“ _Don’t_ question me!” Shido says with a vicious sort of pleasure, and it clicks, then, that he’s just bullying Goro to better his own mood, taking his fear of Inoue out on Goro by watching Goro squirm and that all this—this is _Inoue’s_ fault—

“I’ll take care of Inoue,” says Goro, before he can think.

He doesn’t actually know if he can. He’s already exhausted from the first Metaverse run, but right now any lengths seem possible when Shido’s looking at him with interest again. The switch from prey to partner is instantaneous; Goro can see it in the way Shido looks at him. Goro’s got no choice but to keep going. “It can be done by today. By—” Goro checks his watch. “Probably not earlier than nine, but by ten, at least.” (Ugh, he’s got an exam first period tomorrow. He’ll… figure it out.)

“Two in one day?”

Like Goro would have ever said outright to Shido that it’s difficult to do two runs in a single day. Shido must have figured it out for himself, which means that Goro really can’t back down now, in case Shido thinks he’s found one of Goro’s weaknesses. “Of course. My powers are hardly exhaustible. I could enter the Metaverse where I stand, even. You want him gone? I’ll do it.”

For a long second, Shido looks at him, and then looks through him, finally using his (admittedly intelligent, if not usually drunken and corrupt) brain to think it through. Taking Inoue out now isn’t a question of what Inoue will do when he’s a vegetable from Goro’s indelicate psychic lobotomy, but what his allies will do: Inoue’s favorite underling Miyagawa, with his direct and close personal connection to Kunikazu Okumura, which would upset Shido’s latest favorite stream of campaign revenue; or Inoue’s brother-in-law Sonoda, with his career deeply embedded in the cyber security industry. What makes these men _so_ particularly corrupt, Goro has come to discover, is that they’ve surrounded themselves with bonds and relationships that drag them into further corruption, until they can’t escape or choose for themselves. Even if these men suddenly woke up as born-again Good People, there’d be simply no way for them to break the rank and file without irreversibly destroying all the many, many relationships they had with other corrupt scum of society, and be suitably scapegoated, ultimately self-destructing as all their relationships are burnt. Goro has long resolved not to make mistakes such as associating himself too closely with anyone—no bridges to burn if he doesn’t have any, so to speak—but it doesn’t mean that the relationships of these corrupt pieces of shit, who’ve all resolved to have each others’ backs in moral degeneracy, can’t be unaccounted for. Shido _must_ understand.

“No,” says Shido at last, and Goro lets out a breath. “It’s not time to get rid of Inoue yet.”

Easy. Shido’s back in line, and Shido thinks that he was the one who came up with that idea in the first place. Goro doesn’t smile, keeps his mouth ruler-straight, but it’s hard with the relief in his gut, now assured that the conversation is fully back in control. He’s a pro at this. He excels at everything he does, doesn’t he? Manipulating his own father had a learning curve, but not an insurmountable one. Truly, he had everything in hand from the start.

Shido stands. Even at a careful distance, Goro hates how tall he is. “Don’t be rash, Akechi-kun,” says Shido at last. “These things require time and delicacy.”

Goro grits his teeth. “Of course. I didn’t mean to rush. As always, just give me the word, and you’ll never have to worry about Inoue again.”

“Damn him,” says Shido to himself, with no particular venom at Goro. Goro listens to the sound of his voice the way a craftsman listens for leaks or cracks, checking to make sure that Shido’s ire is appropriately targeted as Inoue and not himself. “The coward. As if he hasn’t done a thousand things that _he_ wouldn’t want reported in a newspaper. Every single bastard in this building just wants to get rid of me—the same hideous song and dance, not a single politician giving a damn about politics anymore—just sabotage, lie, bargain…”

“They’re only attempting to get rid of you because they’re afraid of you,” Goro says soothingly. “Because they know that you’re worth fearing.”

“Disgusting."

“I agree,” says Goro. He’s not even lying.

Shido surveys the destruction on his desk with disdain, as if someone else had thrown an adult-sized temper tantrum in his own office. “If my career goes down, this country might as well hang.”

“I won’t let that happen,” says Goro. “I have always believed in your vision. I won’t let anyone touch you.”

Shido eyes him.

Goro spreads his hands pleasantly. “Don’t you have any faith in me? I have always been your biggest supporter, Shido-san. You think there’s any length to ensure your success that I would not go?”

Shido, suddenly, laughs. It should be reassuring, but it sounds like a warning sign, just one that Goro doesn’t quite understand yet. “Most politicians have their wife to stand behind them and their careers. Suppose I don’t need a woman when I’ve got you.”

Goro’s face smiles while Goro’s brain slides a knife through the meat of the statement, neatly compartmentalizing it into even halves: the part that he can respond to, the implications he will think about later if he _really_ needs to pull a distasteful card to save his own skin. “Surely no woman would put a bullet in someone’s skull for you. You’re better off with me, if I’m being honest.”

More laughter. Doesn’t sound quite as threatening, but Goro can never really be sure, to be honest.

“What is it like?” Shido says, to Goro’s momentary confusion, and sits back down at his desk. At last, Shido seems more relaxed—not enough that Goro isn’t keenly aware of how tightly Shido’s jaw is still clenched, how hard his fists are. “I’ve always been curious. Years into cognitive psience research, and I’ve never actually seen how it works myself. What was she like, when you killed her?”

 _I didn’t_ kill _her_ , a voice in Goro’s head says, which is a lie: Goro might have only caused a mental shutdown, but it’s no way to avoid blame. The mental shutdown led to her death. He _functionally_ killed her. If not _de jure_ , then _de facto_ , as Sae might say. What was it _like_? Delayed impact, he thinks. An object thrown at high speeds breaks upon hard contact, as inertia crushes it against the surface; an object coming to a delayed halt remains intact, as if nothing had really happened after all. Reality is like that. Tokyo, specifically, is like that. The removal of a playground leads to drug addiction in sixteen-year-olds four years later. Getting fired from a job means a single mother kills herself eighteen months from now. A paper penned by a nice man in a suit who gives his daughter ice cream on her birthday and roses to his wife on no particular occasion except love and money later leads to major defunding of an entire office, then renewal initiatives for an entire neighborhood, dozens of dozens of elderly families pushed out to live in cheaper and dirtier and uglier homes, until half of them catches colds from the mold in the walls spread by the defunding of some other government department spread by some other nice man in a suit’s paperwork, and bodies are removed from apartments in a slow trickle over the course of eight years.

That’s not what Shido wants to hear. He wants to hear about the hard crush of fist on cheekbone, about bodies breaking, violence in spectacle instead of the abstract.

“She begged,” Goro begins, unsure of where to start weaving this particular web. He knows it’s got to be to Shido’s tastes; sometimes he’s not entirely sure what those tastes are, only that his life depends on his accuracy. From the brief quirk of Shido’s lips, Goro doesn’t seem to have started off too badly. “Most of them do. It’s remarkable how bits of psyche become self-aware of their own impending death, even when the person herself isn’t.”

Shido looks unamused. Honed by interview after interview for the audience’s mood, Goro knows to pivot instantly: “Of course, she put up a fight. A little pathetic, how women especially become so vicious when they struggle…” (That’s a better angle, from the new interest on Shido’s face.) “…but all ultimately pointless, really. Her expression when she realized she couldn’t win was truly something I wish you could have seen, Shido-san.”

Shido leans back in his chair. Takes a deep breath, pleased. “The moment the hopelessness sets in,” he says, like sharing a private joke with Goro. “You have such an eye for cruelty, Akechi-kun.”

“Is it cruelty if it’s only the moment people learn their proper place in society?” Goro replies easily, unsure of whether or not he means it—unsure of where the originality of that statement came from—either way, Shido barks a laugh. Again, Goro can feel his own mind sliding the knife down the middle, separating himself into the half that means it, the half that doesn’t; the half of him that understands Shido perfectly, the half of him that, in disgust, can’t wait to purge the earth of filth like Shido. “I think you’d like the Metaverse, Shido-san. It’s a shame that of all people, you don’t have the ability to see how correct you are in accusing this government of filth and corruption.”

Shido laces his fingers together. “There’s worse things than having someone like you to do it for me,” says Shido, which is the sort of flattering nonsense that Goro has learned quickly to detect and filter out. “I’ll let you know when it’s time to address Inoue. I won’t keep you any longer, Akechi-kun. It’s a school night for you still isn’t it?”

“It’s no bother.”

“I’d hate to get in the way of a newly-minted honor student,” says Shido, and something like flattered pride rises in Goro’s gut that Shido would bother to remember how Goro’s been doing in school. In irony of all ironies, that’s more than a lot of kids can say about their fathers, isn’t it? “I’ll be in contact.”

Alright, time for the exit. This conversation was a little rough, but the best impressions are left at the end; a smooth closure can do wonders to erase whatever slip-ups Shido might have thought he saw from Goro. “Don’t hesitate for anything you need,” says Goro, and bows, not as low as he should, and turns to go.

“Ah, Akechi-kun. Wait.”

Goro stops. Turns.

For some reason, Shido cracks one knuckle—an odd habit that Goro’s never seen him do, and it’s loud and wet in the brief silence. “In these moments of weakness, I do appreciate having you by my side,” says Shido. He says it easily, like it costs him nothing to admit his own failures. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course. And it’s my honor to be here,” says Goro automatically, finding again, that one half of him means it, and that the other half files it away: The moments of human weakness are the moments to listen for in Shido’s voice, from now on, to take full advantage of. All in all, this interaction has been a success. He learns that he gains nothing by seeing Shido as more or less than a man, above or below the sickly stench of fearing someone with the right blackmail. Shido is handing himself over to Goro piece by piece, day by day. Soon, it’ll be too late. Both halves of Goro smile.

*

Goro throws up in the single-stalled bathroom one floor down from Shido’s office. He wishes he knew why; he wishes that he could claim that the image of the woman’s to-be corpse haunted him behind the eyes, or that he feels somehow morally superior for having had such a bodily reaction to throw up after that sort of conversation. But he knows it for what it is, which is that he’s being a little bitch about it. He washes the sweat and tears off his face, pulls out a toothbrush from his briefcase that he keeps for this exact reason, because no matter how many times they do this, he’s still traitorously weak—full of flaws, up to his throat, choking on the stuff.

It doesn’t matter. Goro’s always been hideous and disgusting and weak on the inside. Comes with his birth. What matters is that nobody else _sees_ it; that nobody _knows_ how weak he is; that he can separate the weakness from the parts of him that are still worth exploiting, like cutting a bruise off a fruit. He does up his school uniform tie again. Puts the toothbrush back in his briefcase. Upon second thought, he takes out his fall gloves—light, black leather, tucked into the briefcase from last week and forgotten about it—and puts them on, covering his skin from his neck to his toes.

The conversation, he decides as he looks himself in the bathroom mirror, was a success.

Therefore, it doesn’t even bother him that the surveillance team is still on his ass as he catches the train back to his apartment. What does it matter if his father still doesn’t trust him? What does it matter if his father might never trust him? Goro can do this all day. Goro can do this for the rest of his life, if he has to. They can watch him all they like for the slightest sign of betrayal—Goro won’t give them the satisfaction of seeing him fall. Now or any other day. If anything, he’ll take it as a compliment that Shido sees him as someone to keep an eye on. If he wants to keep such a close eye on him, then Goro will give him a performance for the ages, smooth and flawless all around. Goro’s weaknesses won’t show, so what does he care if Shido wants to watch him like a shark for his first sign of weakness? Goro has nothing to fear.

He unlocks his phone and finds the video of the woman still up, auto-playing because he hadn’t bothered to pause it. In the mostly-empty subway car, Goro keeps one eye on the plainsclothes man. With the other, he watches the woman die again, and again, and again, and doesn’t bother to ask himself why.

**Author's Note:**

> twitter [@p5crimes](https://twitter.com/p5crimes)  
> tumblr [@akechicrimes](http://akechicrimes.tumblr.com)


End file.
